Scholars working within the field of “Federal Courts” have, from the
beginning, been concerned about the past and future of the federal courts as
instruments of government. But the beginning of Federal Courts as a field was
in the early 1950s, several decades after the Judiciary Act of 1891 created the
intermediate circuit courts of appeals and almost three decades after the
Judiciary Act of 1925 reconfigured the relationship between the Supreme Court
and all other courts in the United States deciding questions of federal law.
And the trajectory that the federal judiciary has traveled since that time has
been relatively consistent. To the extent that this may have resulted in a
failure to appreciate the forces that had already made the federal
courts so powerful by the time Federal Courts came into its own, Justin Crowe’s
recent book Building
the Judiciaryoffers a helpful corrective.